It’s a new moral challenge for developers, one that’s producing new collaborations with nonprofit groups, circumvention tools, and a new way to think about an app’s responsibility to its users. But with developers thousands of miles away, it can be hard to know what to change. How an app is built can make a crucial difference in those cases. The apps themselves have become both evidence of a crime and a means of resistance. As LGBTQ Egyptians flock to apps like Grindr, Hornet, and Growlr, they face an unprecedented threat from police and blackmailers who use the same apps to find targets. It’s an alarming story, but a common one. He jumped at the chance, leaving Egypt behind forever. Eventually, the authorities offered him an informal deportation - a chance to leave the country, in exchange for signing away his asylum rights and paying for the ticket himself. Police kept him locked up for two weeks after that, refusing to allow visitors and even denying that he was in custody. But Firas’ lawyer was able to appeal the conviction, overturning it six weeks later. After three weeks, he was convicted of crimes related to debauchery and sentenced to a year in prison.
He was taken to the Forensic Authority, where doctors examined his anus for signs of sexual activity, but there was still no real evidence of a crime. They beat him regularly and made sure the other inmates knew what he was in for. Police there had printouts of his chat history that were taken from his phone after the arrest. He would spend the next 11 weeks in detention, mostly at the Doqi police station. Believing he would be given better treatment, he agreed - but things only got worse from there. Investigators told him to say he had been molested as a child, that the incident was responsible for his deviant sexual habits.
The condoms he had brought were entered as evidence. The police made him unlock his phone so they could check it for evidence. He was taken to the Mogamma, an immense government building on Tahrir Square that houses Egypt’s General Directorate for Protecting Public Morality. “They caught me and beat me up, insulting me with the worst words possible.” I was scared to be hit on my face so I gave in.” At that moment, I saw a person coming from a police microbus with a baton. They tied my left hand and tried to tie my right. “They caught me and beat me up, insulting me with the worst words possible. “Seven or eight people chased me,” he later told the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, a local LGBT rights group. When the car stopped, the officer working the checkpoint talked to Firas’ date with deference, almost as if he were a fellow cop. At the last minute, his date pulled up in a car and offered to take Firas directly to his apartment.Ī few blocks into the ride, Firas saw the checkpoint, a rare occurrence in a quiet, residential area like Mesaha. When the day came to meet, he was late - so late that Firas almost called the whole thing off. The man had been aggressive, explicitly asking Firas to bring condoms for the night ahead. They had met online, part of a growing community of gay Egyptians using services like Grindr, Hornet, and Growler, but this was their first time meeting in person. He was meeting a man in Dokki’s Mesaha Square, a tree-lined park just across the Nile from Cairo, for what was supposed to be a romantic rendezvous. Firas knew something was wrong when he saw the checkpoint.